Venus Doom by HIM

Venus Doom, HIM's sixth studio album, came out on Sire in 2007, and it's the Finnish band at their heaviest and bleakest. Hiili Hiilesmaa and Tim Palmer, both old hands with the group, produced it at Finnvox Studios in Helsinki while Ville Valo's life came apart: his drinking had gotten bad enough to wreck his health, he suffered a nervous breakdown mid-sessions and went into rehab afterwards, and his split from his fiancée Jonna Nygrén bled into the songs.

You can hear the doom-metal records the band were soaking up, My Dying Bride, Anathema and Paradise Lost, in the crushing weight of it, with Linde's guitar, Mige's bass and Gas Lipstick's drums grinding under Valo's velvet croon and Burton's keyboards adding gothic gloom. "The Kiss of Dawn" reached number two in Finland. The album gave HIM their best US placing yet at number twelve, went gold at home and earned the band a Grammy nomination for its special-edition packaging.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.